ed to them,
and in a postscript we shall have to gather up the minor or anonymous work,
some of it of very high excellence, of the second division of our whole
subject, including plays of the second, third, and fourth periods. But with
this fourth period we enter into what may really be called by comparison
(remembering always what has been said in the last chapter) a period of
decadence, and at its latter end it becomes very decadent indeed. Only in
Ford perhaps, of our named and individual authors in this chapter, and in
him very rarely, occur the flashes of sheer poetry which, as we have seen
in each of the three earlier chapters on the drama, lighten the work of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists proper with extraordinary and lavish
brilliance. Not even in Ford are to be found the whole and perfect studies
of creative character which, even leaving Shakespere out of the question,
are to be found earlier in plays and playwrights of all kinds and
strengths, from _The Maid's Tragedy_ and _Vittoria Corombona_, to _The
Merry Devil of Edmonton_ and _A Cure for a Cuckold_. The tragedies have Ben
Jonson's labour without his force, the comedies his coarseness and lack of
inspiriting life without his keen observation and incisive touch. As the
taste indeed turned more and more from tragedy to comedy, we get attempts
on the part of playwrights to win it back by a return to the bloody and
monstrous conceptions of an earlier time, treated, however, without the
redeeming features of that time, though with a little more coherence and
art. Massinger's _Unnatural Combat_, and Ford's _'Tis Pity She's a Whore_,
among great plays, are examples of this: the numerous minor examples are
hardly worth mentioning. But the most curious symptom of all was the
gradual and, as it were, imperceptible loss of the secret of blank verse
itself, which had been the instrument of the great triumphs of the stage
from Marlowe to Dekker. Something of this loss of grasp may have been
noticed in the looseness of Fletcher and the over-stiffness of Jonson: it
is perceptible distinctly even in Ford and Massinger. But as the
Restoration, or rather the silencing of the theatres by the Commonwealth
approaches, it becomes more and more evident until we reach the chaotic and
hideous jumble of downright prose and verse that is neither prose nor
verse, noticeable even in the early plays of Dryden, and chargeable no
doubt with the twenty years' return of the English